The British retreat from Kabul.1842 On 31 December 1600, The British East India Company (BEIC) started as an enterprise of London businessmen importing spices and goods from South Asia; cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and opium. By royal decree, the BEIC was given monopoly privileges
Mme. Delphine LaLaurie was one of the grandest and most opulent of the opulent Grand Dames of ante bellum New Orleans high society. In a housefire in her mansion in 1834, it was discovered that Mme. LaLaurie and her husband, physician Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie, were maintaining a dungeon of
Brigadier General Robert Latimer McCook was one of the famed Fighting McCooks of Ohio, seventeen men from the same family who fought for the Union, including four who would become generals. On August 5, 1862, McCook was shot in a skirmish near Huntsville, Alabama. At the time, renegade
THE SULTANA When the Civil War concluded, many of the inmates at Andersonville Prison were taken to temporary parole camps outside Vicksburg, Miss. They were given medical treatment, food and clothing while awaiting transport home, by train or steamboat. The Sultana, a 260-foot-long wooden Mississippi River side-wheel steamboat which
The Battle of Richmond, Kentucky, fought August 29-30, 1862. It was a shocking, one-sided loss by Union Major General, William "Bull" Nelson's forces to the Confederates of Major General Edmund Kirby Smith. In the first major battle in Kentucky, Nelson had sent 6,800 men into battle, and 5.353 of them
On Sunday morning, April 2, 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was sitting in a morning church service when he received an urgent message from General Robert E. Lee. Lee told him the defensive line at Petersburg had been broken, and that the Confederate government should evacuate Richmond immediately or risk
In 1855, George Bickley, a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, organized Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) a powerful and secret Southern Rights, White Supremacist society. The KGC financed illegal slave ships after slave importing was abolished in 1808, and pushed for the re-establishment of the African slave-trade. The KGC was
Braxton Bragg is generally regarded as "The Confederacy’s Worst General." He commanded the 2nd largest Rebel Army, the Army of Tennessee. It was the largest Confederate military force in the western theater. A career military man, and veteran of the Mexican War of 1846, Bragg failed spectacularly. He withdrew and
Sam Watkins was a Corporal in Company H, 1st Tennessee Infantry Regiment, the “Maury Grays.” He fought in nearly every large battle in the Western Theater of the Civil War, including the battles of Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Corinth, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Jonesboro. His memoir,
Born New York, Gen. John T. Wilder was descended from a long line battlefield heroes and patriots. Both his grandfather and great grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War, and legend has it the younger man replaced the older man on the line at Bunker Hill after a cannonball removed
